My apologies for being late with this first post, but Mercury in Retrograde has been kicking my butt. Anyway, as a guest-blogger, I realize that I need to introduce myself to the Feministe community. I thought I’d start out with an anecdote:
When I was younger, I spent summers in Puerto Rico with my grandparents. It was an opportunity to get out of New York for a while and meant my mother didn’t have to worry about what to do with me for the months that school was out of session. Aguadilla is a pretty small town, and my grandparents seemed to know everyone. I rarely knew these people, and by way of introduction, they would invariably say “Ésta es Aimée, la de Zaida.” Roughly, that translates as, “This is Aimée, Zaida’s daughter.” Even then I was fascinated by this idea that I didn’t stand on my own, but that my existence depended on my relationship to others, in this case, my mother.
That sense of self, that I exist in relationship to and with others has been a big part of my life and in many ways guides my work. As a reproductive justice activist (www.protectchoice.org) and general trouble-maker, I am rooted in the real lived experiences of the communities I come from. Whether it’s my ethnic community (Puerto Ricans), my sports community (Go Yankees!) or my political community (Radicals and Progressives), I see myself as part of a larger group of people with shared values and a shared worldview. I bring all those people with me to everything I do. So what does that mean? It means I focus on issues of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, ability, sexual orientation and sexual identity. I follow politics to understand how the issues I care about are dealt with (or more often the case, ignored) and how they impact our daily lives. I think about power constantly – who has it, who doesn’t, how is it being used to advance a more just world and how is it being used to keep people down.
And I think a lot about cancer. Ten months ago my mother, Zaida, was diagnosed with stage 3 gastric cancer. I’ll write more about that later. For now, let’s just say that cancer has become a big part of my life.
So over the next week that we’re sharing this space, I hope we’ll get to know each other, challenge other and support each other. Respectfully. In the meantime, allow me to introduce myself, “Soy Aimée, la de Zaida.”